by Mary Pilon
Soon it was time to head back to the airport to catch their flight to Bermuda.
With Amanda in the passenger seat once again, Kevin got behind the wheel and began to drive fast and recklessly, with no regard for curbs or medians. The truck, roaring, jolted back and forth and forward through space in a crooked, jerking motion, Kevin and Amanda with it. Amanda pleaded for him to slow down or let her drive, to no avail.
Kevin told her to grab the “oh shit” handle on the truck—the grip located just above the window—to steady herself, a feeble maneuver in the face of the truck’s movement.
“If you don’t stop bringing me down,” he said, “I’m going to hurt you.”106
He careened the car toward Boston Harbor as Amanda’s scream pierced the air.
KEVIN
Police officers picked up Kevin107 after he drove his car onto the curb at arrivals at Logan. That was after he had hit a fence, the fence that had kept him and Amanda from plunging into New England waters, a haunting possibility that law enforcement and doctors would learn about in the hours that followed.
The police handed him off to medical personnel, and just before three o’clock that afternoon, an ambulance pulled in to the rolling grounds of McLean Hospital with Kevin inside. An affiliate of Harvard Medical School, McLean was founded in 1811 and some of its grounds were landscaped by the famed Central Park landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (who would later be treated at McLean and die there in 1903), and it had a regal yet friendly feel. Legend has it that it was Mary Sawyer, a McLean attendant who joined the staff in the 1830s, who inspired the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”108 Unlike many other institutions, McLean modeled its treatment of patients after restorative Quaker models rather than punitive ones. Over the years it had housed many famous patients, including the Nobel Prize–winning mathematician John Nash, the musicians Ray Charles and Steven Tyler, the poets Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, the writer Susanna Kaysen, and, not long before the time that Kevin walked through its doors, the author David Foster Wallace. With such an illustrious reputation, McLean seemed to Kevin like the perfect place for the star of The Show to recover from his latest episode.109
The doctors there found Kevin wildly manic, talking in spurts of peace, beauty. “Distractible,” one wrote in his chart. “Grandiose with flight of ideas.” The doctors also confirmed his bipolar disorder diagnosis, adding that Kevin was “likely to be in denial of his reported disorder and his need for continued treatment.”
At first, Kevin refused medication. Subsequently, he was found naked on the side of his gurney, trying to walk with restraints and at “serious risk” of having the gurney fold on him. The doctors told Kevin that he either had to have four-point restraints or take medication. He chose the latter and soon was heavily sedated.
Later, a tone of joy still in his voice, Kevin told the doctors all about the plot of The Show and about preparing to compete in the Olympics. All of that sounded like delusional thinking, but upon examining his records more closely, the doctors realized that at least part of Kevin’s conversation wasn’t as deranged as it had seemed. Kevin also told the doctors that he’d started experimenting with his medication, though he knew he shouldn’t have, but he wouldn’t tell them why.
At McLean, Kevin returned to his habit of ceremonial cigarette breaks. These became a focus of his day, a central goal for him to work toward; he relished having the small fire between his hands, having control over something, even if it was small and only for a few minutes. Smoking gave him a chance to socialize, making him feel as though he was leaving the hospital for a short time and fantasizing about who he thought he might be110 or might want to be once he was really out. He also ate a fair amount, even though the food was bland. Taking one bite after another made him feel comfortable, and eating was another thing over which he had agency in a landscape where otherwise there was none.
Hospital life gave him plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of his actions, and the guilt sank in. There had been too many near misses in the last episode of The Show for comfort. What if he and Amanda had really crashed into the harbor? What if his car had hit innocent pedestrians? The Show had created annoyances like lost wallets and such in the past, but this was the first time his mania had put not only his own life in danger but the lives of others, including one of someone he loved deeply. It felt nothing short of miraculous that no one had gotten hurt. How could he possibly begin to explain or apologize for what had happened?
The questions floated around his still-clouded mind as he roamed McLean’s halls. Group therapy can irritate many patients, particularly if they are coming down from a manic episode, but Kevin enjoyed it most of the time, feeling a sense of connection with his fellow patients. He also quickly understood that good behavior served as the currency that could buy him out of McLean and back to his life outside, to sailing. They weren’t about to let him out if he couldn’t manage hanging out with a few people, crazy or otherwise. He enjoyed the music room, the kind doctors, and the thoughtful staff. His sense of spiritual crisis began to lift.
What especially bothered Kevin about his latest episode was that in The Show, for the first time, he had felt more persecuted rather than euphoric. There were people who were out to get him, and as he had gripped the steering wheel of his truck, he had thought that even Amanda was against him. How had the thoughts in his mind become so scrambled, so tossed and turned? Kevin could navigate a boat with the best in the world, graduate from an Ivy League school, hold his own in a conversation with his doctor parents and their peers. But for a few moments in the wee morning hours near Logan Airport, he hadn’t been able to trust his own girlfriend, or himself, for reasons that he was the first to admit made no sense.
He found himself perturbed over what to do about his relationship with Amanda. She was young, beautiful, and intelligent, and she had her whole future ahead of her. Kevin couldn’t help but wonder if he was standing in the way of that. He felt that she should be able to live her life, make her own choices, and see other people, places, and things without having to worry about him. His bipolar disorder and cancer were bad enough, but he also brought the complications of hoping to be a traveling professional sailor to the relationship.
Kevin finally told the McLean nurses and doctors why he had gone off his medication. He felt great without them, he said, which was a nice break from feeling terrible. Like the other times he’d gone off his meds, he hadn’t told anyone his intentions beforehand—he saw no good in that. Now, though, he could tell that he had been playing some sort of game, both with himself and with others. Would anyone notice that he wasn’t taking the pills? There was such a fine line between being off his meds and feeling better, and being off his meds and spiraling out of control. At McLean, Kevin received Haldol, a drug that typically takes only thirty to sixty seconds to take effect, and it is most potent in stemming psychotic bouts, be they from bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or a bad LSD trip.
Because of the heavy downers, Kevin had a hard time reading or writing, a torturous experience, as he was a man in need of a creative outlet. When the tools for processing words did come back to him, he sat and wrote letters to friends and family. Checkered with crossed-out words, they lacked the eloquence that usually came to him so easily. His typically clear penmanship became a series of scribbles, diagrams, and drawings, though he also realized that he was now more willing to be disorganized. Poetry flowed, which emboldened him, and he felt a sense of peace when writing it, as it was just him and his thoughts. He wasn’t trying to please his professors, Amanda, his friends, his family, his sailing teammates, or even the audience of The Show. Sailing rewarded creativity in some ways, but Kevin felt as though most sailing decisions were binary. One either tacked, maneuvering the bow of a boat into the wind, or didn’t. Decisions were based on yes-or-no questions, whereas poetry felt like the opposite, a free form in which the more creative side of Kevin’s brain could be looser.
Still, sailing con
tinued to make its voice heard. When Kevin’s parents learned about his second Boston episode, their reaction was to help get their son back on the water. It was there that he seemed most at peace and most focused, working toward a tangible goal. It was there he should return.
AMANDA
Amanda and Kevin had talked about his mania at length in person, on the phone, and in their letters. But the near plunge into the harbor immediately showed her that the consequences of those lows could be far greater than she had realized. They could even put her life in jeopardy. Being close to Kevin was what she longed for, but it was also what could kill her.
She remembered Kevin calling her more than a year before and telling her all about what had happened in Japan. She had stood there in her dorm room holding the phone and tried to understand, among other things, why he had wandered out into the streets of Tokyo111 with his eyes closed. And as she tried to stretch her brain around his twisted logic, she remembered thinking, This guy seems a little nuts. Maybe I shouldn’t be with him.
Yet she stayed. The time it would have taken for the truck to plunge down the ledge a few feet toward the harbor couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but it replayed slowly in her mind. The moment that the truck landed on four wheels on the ground, she was instantly shocked not to be drowning, not to be fighting in the water for her final breaths. As she took in the miracle of her nonaquatic surroundings—some kind of freight yard—Kevin kept his eyes fixed ahead and kept driving along as if they hadn’t just nearly missed death. That, perhaps more than the plunge itself, had made her realize that this wasn’t the version of Kevin she had fallen in love with in physics class, the Kevin of Peter and the Wolf and of love notes, but, was, rather, some distortion of him.
When the cops approached them moments later, the car clumsily perched on the curb, Amanda had struggled to explain to them that Kevin wasn’t a criminal. Whatever his intentions, the case that he posed no danger to himself or others was hard to make.
Kevin had volleyed from being giddy about the prospect of a tropical vacation to being dark and paranoid, suspicious of what Amanda’s “role” was. It was almost as if there were some sort of lever in his mind that could flip on or off, positive or negative, and Amanda had no clue which direction things could go, or who was in charge of the switch. She was angry at the manic Kevin because he had put her through hell, but she also didn’t know if she could ask the familiar, nonmanic Kevin to apologize for the manic Kevin. She felt angry but had no idea where to place that fury and frustration; at times it seemed as though the man who had wronged her had left the room and had left a different version of Kevin standing before her.
Her parents back home in New York, coming from a place of love, wanted her to partner and partner well. Amanda didn’t know how she could defend Kevin to her mother, and even less to her father, to whom she was so close, when Kevin had nearly killed her. She knew her friends back in Providence would support her when she tried to explain Kevin’s episodes, but she wouldn’t be able to admit as easily that part of her thrived on being Kevin’s caregiver, his strength, his spine. She was as stable as he was unstable, a quick emergency responder, deriving huge pleasure from being a rock. Yes, he had nearly killed her in a fit of mania, but she would be lying if she said that the adrenaline rush leading up to that moment in the truck hadn’t been precisely that—a rush.
As she spent time in and around hospitals with Kevin, listening to hospital chatter, Amanda shifted away from her earlier interest in physics to an interest in her father’s field, health care. At first she fought the impulse, but the more she thought about it, the more she realized that she would find the challenge and rigor of medicine fulfilling.
Amanda was still madly in love with Kevin112 in spite of the trauma. After several days, Kevin was ready to come home to Providence. Amanda spoke with the physicians at McLean about what was best for him, and she vowed to help him recover and stay consistent with his health, his medication. To Kevin, who didn’t know how to begin to apologize to Amanda, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that she didn’t dump him.
GORDON
It wasn’t that Gordon didn’t have the money to pay for Kevin’s medical expenses, it was that spending it felt so pointless, wasteful even. How was his son ever going to learn if his father kept financially supporting his illness? They were four years into this madness and nothing seemed to be improving. In fact, it only seemed to be getting worse. To Gordon, it was unfathomable that Kevin had gone off his meds even when he knew the consequences of doing so.
Over the phone, Gordon told Kevin that he would no longer pay his medical bills, including the insurance that covered his psychiatric care and hospitalizations. Kevin reeled at the news, wondering how he was going to cope with the bills and all the insurance forms on his own.
Kevin and his family had already spent countless hours arguing with insurance companies about what was covered and what wasn’t, one hoop after another. His father and mother were both medical professionals and they still struggled to deal with it all. There were moments when they all wondered, What hope did he or anyone else have in navigating the system?
KEVIN
There was something about seeing his mother’s wedding that triggered Kevin’s fears about his own marital future. For weeks leading up to the gathering, he had looked forward to bringing Amanda as his date, but something about the environment sent him into a tailspin about their relationship. The thought that he had had at McLean, that Amanda had so much ahead of her and he was such a mess, deepened in his mind, a conversation of doubt in which Amanda was not engaged. How could they possibly stay together?
Susanne and her new love, Ted Lammot, were married in North Hatley, Canada, in May 1993, not far from where Susanne had grown up in Eastern Townships, with Kevin, Kristina, and Amanda in attendance. All these years later, there Susanne was in a wedding dress, older, but not far from where she had spent endless hours on the water with her late father. Ted and Susanne had met at a party not long after her divorce, and she was charmed from the moment he offered to drive her home. Kevin welcomed Ted into the family. He was smart and kind, and he had a warm and compassionate attitude toward Kevin’s mental health, never judging him. And he actually listened, which was refreshing.
Ted had seven children from his marriages. Susanne got along with all of them and dated Ted for six years before deciding to get married, both feeling no need to rush and wanting the dust to settle from their respective divorces. The large, combined family mostly got along and all enjoyed each other’s company. Kevin and Susanne had different political beliefs from Ted, who leaned to the right, but no one minded much.
Kevin, like his mother, had refocused. He had taken a job at a Coffee Bean113 to help pay for some of his medical expenses now that his dad had opted out. He also did some coaching, which he enjoyed, but it wasn’t particularly lucrative, and worked a few stints at a car wash. At age twenty-three, he still had time to figure out the feasibility of a bid for the 1996 Games.
Milling about at the reception following the ceremony, looking at his family, Kevin worried about how he and Amanda could ever build a family together, particularly after the removal of his second testicle. What was she doing here? Did she really understand the implications of what the rest of her life would look like with him? Amanda was intelligent, part of what had drawn him to her in the first place, yet at this juncture, she seemed naive, and unaware.
He broke up with her.
AMANDA
Kevin had invited her to Canada to be his wedding date, to spend time with his family—and then to dump her?
It didn’t make any sense. She hadn’t “done” anything, nor had he. Kevin kept explaining to her that she was only twenty-one and he was nearly twenty-four, that it was unfair for her to spend the rest of her life tethered not only to him, but also to his bipolar disorder. Although he said he understood her heartbreak, she still couldn’t see the years ahead and the wide array of options that she would
have.
Amanda couldn’t tell whether he was speaking from his heart or was on the edge of another episode. But she did know how she felt—devastated, and unsure how to handle the sudden rejection. Everything on Brown’s campus seemed to remind her of him, and during some moments, the place that had been her haven started to feel like a cage. She was trapped in memories involving Kevin that she was more than ready to forget, but she had barely known life there without him.
Yet she was also at a juncture of her own. She would graduate from Brown the following year and had decided to go take some summer courses and perhaps pursue medicine, a track that would likely put her geography at odds with Kevin’s. Once she would have considered that a hardship, but she now wondered if it would be for the best.
There it was between the two of them: complicated. They were no longer together but still felt immensely attracted to each other. It wasn’t really clear to Amanda why they couldn’t just date, be boyfriend and girlfriend, as they had been before.
She had no choice but to move ahead with her life, painful though it was to be doing so without Kevin.
KEVIN
As he stood outside New York’s Grand Central Terminal, all Kevin could think about was Amanda. He felt completely deflated. By his own choice, he felt as though he had lost the love of his life.114
It was the summer after his mother’s wedding and Kevin was living near Long Island Sound, where he had taken a coaching job. Before dawn one morning, feeling that he needed some stimulation,115 he had driven into the city via its snakes of surrounding highways, just on the cusp of the workday morning, when garbage trucks clang and coffee carts open their windows. He parked his white Toyota truck, still bearing California plates, on a curb in Midtown and walked toward the opulent Grand Central Terminal. Much like Tokyo’s Imperial Palace, Grand Central was the city’s central temple, a Beaux-Arts train hub, constantly aflutter with the sharp elbows of commuters and the curiosity of tourists, a practical traffic hub with an aura of religious grandeur.